And smalishah's avatar is the most classy one by far Jan certainly echoes the sentiments of CW

Yeah we don't crap in the first world; most of us would actually have no idea what that was emanating from Ajmal's backside. Why isn't it roses and rainbows like what happens here? PEWS's retort to Ganeshran on Daemon's picture depicting Ajmal's excreta

Huma Yusaf just became my favorite columnist. She has expressed my feelings about Imran Khan with more eloquence and clarity than I could ever muster. The column is so damn good, that not only am I linking it above, but I'm also going to paste it below!

Imran Khan’s security state

Huma Yusuf | Opinion | From the Newspaper

THERE has already been adequate kerfuffle around the appearance of PTI senior vice-president Ejaz Chaudhry at the Difaa-i-Pakistan Council’s rally in Karachi.

This is the latest demonstration of PTI’s tendency to cavort with the religious right and extremist groups. Imran Khan himself delivered a message via his envoy at the DPC’s Lahore rally in December. Previously, Chaudhry has attended rallies with Jamaatud Dawa’s Hafiz Saeed. And flags of the banned SSP have been raised at many a PTI rally. The further right the Great Khan and his party stray, the more defensive his supporters become. It is high time that defence was analysed.

PTI’s urban supporters claim that liberal elitists (such as themselves, ironically) evoke the bogeyman of ‘Taliban Khan’ in a last-ditch attempt to undermine his credibility. This, they claim, is ultimate proof that the man has no real flaws. The critique is then easily dismissed with a classicist jibe — ‘extremists’, say PTI’s people, is simply a particular social elite’s synonym for ‘the masses’.

Supporters who are willing to engage the critique more seriously argue that Khan is not advocating on behalf of extremist groups, rather he is trying to engage stakeholders across Pakistan’s political and ideological spectrum (let’s leave aside Khan’s flip-flopping on the blasphemy law issue, which specifically panders to an ideological subset). Still other supporters — perhaps those of a cynical bent — suggest Khan is doing whatever it takes to get elected, and remain confident that he will return to his true, progressive self once in power.

Push hard enough, and all PTI supporters backed into the ‘Taliban Khan’ corner will ultimately offer the same defence: the spread of religious extremism is not Pakistan’s biggest problem. We must first tackle urgent issues such as the economy, energy and education. Khan is the man to deliver on these counts.

And herein lies the logical fallacy of most PTI supporters. Countering religious extremism — in other words, separating mosque and state and championing a secular Pakistan — is a prerequisite of service delivery in a democracy. Secularism calls for neutrality in the public sphere; it mandates that no one can prop one faith, ideology or worldview above another. In democracies, secularism is the guarantor of neutral and equitable service delivery, and thus the starting point of citizenship, because it prevents public institutions from privileging particular groups on the basis of their beliefs or preferences. In other words, the state cannot hope to fairly provide energy and education for its people until it views them in a neutral fashion.

But let’s concede that this argument is too academic, littered with pie-in-the-sky semantics. There’s still no escaping the fact that ‘religion’ in Pakistan is not merely an abstract concept that can be debated at the polity’s leisure. The rationale of the established security state is founded on a particular interpretation of Islam; indeed, religion has long been wielded as a policy tool to justify the maintenance of a large Muslim army against Indian ‘infidels’ across the border.

In short, Pakistan’s security state is an Islamist state. The extremist groups that Khan’s party hobnobs with are not organic expressions of a religious interpretation that just happened to become popular — they were created and cultivated by the state to promote a very particular political and foreign policy agenda. Deconstructing that agenda is certainly a requirement for improving service delivery.

To put all this in concrete terms: the religious political parties and extremist groups that the PTI is willing to openly engage support a status quo in which the Pakistan Army is the country’s dominant political player and India is the perennial enemy. In these circumstances, a bulk of Pakistan’s GDP is diverted towards defence spending, leaving little for education, healthcare or infrastructure development. The only option for managing this status quo is to spur economic growth so that all stakeholders (the army, educators, healthcare providers, etc.) get bigger pieces of an overall larger pie. The best way to do that is to boost trade between Pakistan and India. This alas remains a no-no by the very terms of the status quo. In sum, Khan has few prospects of improving social service delivery as long as the status quo persists. And believe me, the status quo will persist as long as Pakistan subscribes to a religiously inflected narrative.

On another note, the status quo also permits the proliferation of extremist groups to counter India’s ever-rising military might.
But as recent history has so brutally taught us, more extremists only means more trouble for Pakistan. And on this point too, PTI’s supporters seem to have it wrong: there can be no meaningful service delivery in the absence of basic security — and there’s no denying that many of the extremist groups participating in DPC rallies are anathema to overall security and stability.

Before I get inundated with emails from PTI activists claiming that I am not giving enough credit to the man who brought back the Cricket World Cup for Pakistan, let me optimistically assume that Khan finds a way to circumvent the security state and focus productively on service delivery. We are still stuck with the simple reality that, in Pakistan’s quid pro quo culture of patronage politics, he will remain beholden to those who facilitated his rise to power.

The religious right and extremist groups can deliver politicians and constituencies to help the PTI get elected. In turn, they will want a stake in the political system and a say in policymaking. One can argue that Khan is already caught in this vicious cycle — his party’s appearances at DPC rallies are conceivably payback for the time when, as the lone PTI legislator in 2002, he was adopted by the MMA. Can Khan bowl his way out of this conundrum?

Huma Yusaf just became my favorite columnist. She has expressed my feelings about Imran Khan with more eloquence and clarity than I could ever muster. The column is so damn good, that not only am I linking it above, but I'm also going to paste it below!

Imran Khan’s security state

Huma Yusuf | Opinion | From the Newspaper

THERE has already been adequate kerfuffle around the appearance of PTI senior vice-president Ejaz Chaudhry at the Difaa-i-Pakistan Council’s rally in Karachi.

This is the latest demonstration of PTI’s tendency to cavort with the religious right and extremist groups. Imran Khan himself delivered a message via his envoy at the DPC’s Lahore rally in December. Previously, Chaudhry has attended rallies with Jamaatud Dawa’s Hafiz Saeed. And flags of the banned SSP have been raised at many a PTI rally. The further right the Great Khan and his party stray, the more defensive his supporters become. It is high time that defence was analysed.

PTI’s urban supporters claim that liberal elitists (such as themselves, ironically) evoke the bogeyman of ‘Taliban Khan’ in a last-ditch attempt to undermine his credibility. This, they claim, is ultimate proof that the man has no real flaws. The critique is then easily dismissed with a classicist jibe — ‘extremists’, say PTI’s people, is simply a particular social elite’s synonym for ‘the masses’.

Supporters who are willing to engage the critique more seriously argue that Khan is not advocating on behalf of extremist groups, rather he is trying to engage stakeholders across Pakistan’s political and ideological spectrum (let’s leave aside Khan’s flip-flopping on the blasphemy law issue, which specifically panders to an ideological subset). Still other supporters — perhaps those of a cynical bent — suggest Khan is doing whatever it takes to get elected, and remain confident that he will return to his true, progressive self once in power.

Push hard enough, and all PTI supporters backed into the ‘Taliban Khan’ corner will ultimately offer the same defence: the spread of religious extremism is not Pakistan’s biggest problem. We must first tackle urgent issues such as the economy, energy and education. Khan is the man to deliver on these counts.

And herein lies the logical fallacy of most PTI supporters. Countering religious extremism — in other words, separating mosque and state and championing a secular Pakistan — is a prerequisite of service delivery in a democracy. Secularism calls for neutrality in the public sphere; it mandates that no one can prop one faith, ideology or worldview above another. In democracies, secularism is the guarantor of neutral and equitable service delivery, and thus the starting point of citizenship, because it prevents public institutions from privileging particular groups on the basis of their beliefs or preferences. In other words, the state cannot hope to fairly provide energy and education for its people until it views them in a neutral fashion.

But let’s concede that this argument is too academic, littered with pie-in-the-sky semantics. There’s still no escaping the fact that ‘religion’ in Pakistan is not merely an abstract concept that can be debated at the polity’s leisure. The rationale of the established security state is founded on a particular interpretation of Islam; indeed, religion has long been wielded as a policy tool to justify the maintenance of a large Muslim army against Indian ‘infidels’ across the border.

In short, Pakistan’s security state is an Islamist state. The extremist groups that Khan’s party hobnobs with are not organic expressions of a religious interpretation that just happened to become popular — they were created and cultivated by the state to promote a very particular political and foreign policy agenda. Deconstructing that agenda is certainly a requirement for improving service delivery.

To put all this in concrete terms: the religious political parties and extremist groups that the PTI is willing to openly engage support a status quo in which the Pakistan Army is the country’s dominant political player and India is the perennial enemy. In these circumstances, a bulk of Pakistan’s GDP is diverted towards defence spending, leaving little for education, healthcare or infrastructure development. The only option for managing this status quo is to spur economic growth so that all stakeholders (the army, educators, healthcare providers, etc.) get bigger pieces of an overall larger pie. The best way to do that is to boost trade between Pakistan and India. This alas remains a no-no by the very terms of the status quo. In sum, Khan has few prospects of improving social service delivery as long as the status quo persists. And believe me, the status quo will persist as long as Pakistan subscribes to a religiously inflected narrative.

On another note, the status quo also permits the proliferation of extremist groups to counter India’s ever-rising military might.
But as recent history has so brutally taught us, more extremists only means more trouble for Pakistan. And on this point too, PTI’s supporters seem to have it wrong: there can be no meaningful service delivery in the absence of basic security — and there’s no denying that many of the extremist groups participating in DPC rallies are anathema to overall security and stability.

Before I get inundated with emails from PTI activists claiming that I am not giving enough credit to the man who brought back the Cricket World Cup for Pakistan, let me optimistically assume that Khan finds a way to circumvent the security state and focus productively on service delivery. We are still stuck with the simple reality that, in Pakistan’s quid pro quo culture of patronage politics, he will remain beholden to those who facilitated his rise to power.

The religious right and extremist groups can deliver politicians and constituencies to help the PTI get elected. In turn, they will want a stake in the political system and a say in policymaking. One can argue that Khan is already caught in this vicious cycle — his party’s appearances at DPC rallies are conceivably payback for the time when, as the lone PTI legislator in 2002, he was adopted by the MMA. Can Khan bowl his way out of this conundrum?

The whole premise of the article is rubbish. Her reasoning that it's religion that is propping up the military establishment is stupid. Look at Turkey and Egypt, which are two secularist states and yet their military is the one that's really in charge. And it's not religion that is continuing this status quo of the military getting funds diverted towards armament and hate towards India. This status quo has existed since Pakistan was created, irrespective of religion.

The whole premise of the article is rubbish. Her reasoning that it's religion that is propping up the military establishment is stupid. Look at Turkey and Egypt, which are two secularist states and yet their military is the one that's really in charge. And it's not religion that is continuing this status quo of the military getting funds diverted towards armament and hate towards India. This status quo has existed since Pakistan was created, irrespective of religion.

I think you need to re-read the article Agent, as I think you’ve missed her point. Her point is not that it’s religion that’s propping up the military, it’s the other way around. It’s the military that has used religion to justify its hold on power. To quote her again:

To put all this in concrete terms: the religious political parties and extremist groups that the PTI is willing to openly engage support a status quo in which the Pakistan Army is the country’s dominant political player and India is the perennial enemy. In these circumstances, a bulk of Pakistan’s GDP is diverted towards defence spending, leaving little for education, healthcare or infrastructure development. The only option for managing this status quo is to spur economic growth so that all stakeholders (the army, educators, healthcare providers, etc.) get bigger pieces of an overall larger pie. The best way to do that is to boost trade between Pakistan and India. This alas remains a no-no by the very terms of the status quo. In sum, Khan has few prospects of improving social service delivery as long as the status quo persists. And believe me, the status quo will persist as long as Pakistan subscribes to a religiously inflected narrative.

On another note, the status quo also permits the proliferation of extremist groups to counter India’s ever-rising military might. But as recent history has so brutally taught us, more extremists only means more trouble for Pakistan. And on this point too, PTI’s supporters seem to have it wrong: there can be no meaningful service delivery in the absence of basic security — and there’s no denying that many of the extremist groups participating in DPC rallies are anathema to overall security and stability.

Imran and his PTI supporters keep arguing that extremism is not Pakistan’s biggest problem – rather that corruption and a faltering economy is what needs fixing. What Huma has beautifully articulated is that without tackling extremism, there will never be the stability needed to tackle corruption and fix the economy. Not only does Imran not take on the extremists (IMO), he also keeps associating himself with them. There is no question in my mind that he’s now the army’s preferred candidate. They (the army) are cultivating a PTI/religious right alliance that they hope will topple the PPP and PML, both of whom are firmly anti-army parties at this point of time. As Huma points out in her article, if Imran becomes the PM, he’ll be beholden to those that got him elected. Hence the religious right will continue to hold power along with the military. There will be no long term peace with India and an almost inevitable clash with the West. All of this instability simply means that Imran will not be able to focus on improving the economy even if he wanted to.

I don't think the military has been using religion. India is portrayed as the bad guy not because they are in majority Hindu, but because of the threat for Invasion and nuclear weapons.

Even if India wasn't a bad guy, there is no guarantee that the military would be weak. It's how our military has developed, that has determined this status quo. The military over the years has done more for the people than the politicians, which is why it's trusted and constantly supported despite going against the principle of a nation state (that the military should serve the administration and not the other way around).

I agree that in order to tackle the economy and corruption, terrorism needs to be the first thing the administration needs to tackle. Otherwise thugs like MQM, TTP and all the other organisations, that have managed to come out of the woodwork, will ruin us in the long-term. However is Imran really with the Terrorists, or is being continuously misunderstood. He has always been against TTP, MQM, etc. He is against the military and wants better relations with India. The whole issue emerged because he was friendly to the tribal people, which I can understand. They are civilians who have not harmed anyone. They aren't the ones killing people, it's the TTP.

I really don't understand why he is forming links with Jamaat e Islami though. I hope it's just to get more votes and nothing else.